I agree whole-heartedly with everything in Ben's review with the exception of his slam on Saturday Night Live alum and comic genius, Adam Sandler. Sonic Shuffle was obviously created to take on Mario Party, only Sega wanted to disguise this by tinkering with it to make it a little "different." That decision doomed Sonic Shuffle to be one of the worst mascot cross over games ever made.

I struggled to understand where the game was coming from conceptually, and what it was trying to achieve as an interactive experience. Still, despite poor word of mouth from the press and gamers alike, I still gave The Bouncer the benefit of the doubt. In the process of playing through the game for the purposes of my review and enjoyment, I tried to look at it from different angles, but no matter which context I tried to look at it from, it still pretty much stank up da house.

Sonic Shuffle is Sega's inevitable entry into the party game genre, which got its start with Nintendo's Mario Party on the Nintendo 64. Guess what—Sonic Shuffle isn't fast, isn't hip, and it certainly doesn't have any attitude. And that's not all. Not only isn't it a good Sonic game, but it also isn't a very good party game, either.

Everything old is new again. A few hardware generations ago on older machines, there were a string of titles which were really nothing but a lot of low-quality full-motion video (FMV) packaged to fool people into thinking they were actual games. While the definition of what is or is not a "game" doesn't exactly have any rules carved in stone, it's pretty safe to say that those titles were more B-movie than anything else.

If done right, the combination of cel and CG animation found in the opening intro might have garnered comparisons to visual innovators like Jet Grind Radio and Fear Effect. Unfortunately, it is so badly done that it only deserves scorn.

Like it or not, names like The Rock and Stone Cold Steve Austin are now part of the nation's lexicon, and it's hard to go a night without seeing some sort of WWF-related event on television. This sort of rampant popularity has spilled over into the videogame industry, which thanks to astute developers like Yukes and Aki, allows couch potatoes to pull on tights and get down and dirty with the WWF superstars. One of the more anticipated wrestling titles was THQ's WWF No Mercy, the follow up to the wildly popular WWF Wrestlemania 2000. Though not quite revolutionary, WWF No Mercy definitely delivers what wrestling fans have been begging for since the last release: more wrestling goodness.

When it comes to humor, I think I was more shocked than Brad by how pathetic it all was. Ever since E3 2000, I was sure that Nintendo and Rare had a winner here. A game that would finally help get videogames out of under the stigma of being just for kids. I also bought into the overwhelmingly positive feedback the game was receiving from critics and saw that as a good sign of things to come.

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